Faculty

If You Want to Go Far, Go Together: Professor Ben Safdi

December 23, 2024

Studying the physics of atomic particles takes a lot of room. The Large Hadron Collider at CERN, the biggest particle accelerator, is in a ring tunnel 27km (17 miles) long buried about two football fields deep underground. It serves as the factory, or artisanal manufacturer, of bespoke subatomic particles like quarks. But where is the design studio for these rare particle models? That would be the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics (...

No. 1 book of the century, ‘My Brilliant Friend’, is subject of UC Berkeley research, courses

December 17, 2024

My Brilliant Friend, by the pseudonymous Italian author Elena Ferrante, is the New York Times’ No. 1 book of the century. This recognition, and the recent adaptation of Ferrante’s four-novel Neopolitan Quartet into an HBO series, underscores this writer’s profound influence.

Ferrante’s popular novels, translated into English by Ann Goldstein, are an intimate exploration...

Marianne Constable named inaugural Distinguished Rhetoric Faculty Fellow

December 17, 2024

The Department of Rhetoric selected Marianne Constable as the inaugural recipient of the Distinguished Rhetoric Faculty Fellowship. Constable is a UC Berkeley professor, a leading authority in law and language, and a co-founder of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities.

“Marianne Constable has amassed a glittering record in scholarship, teaching, and service over the course of her 34-year...

Ken Ribet awarded math prize for influential proof

December 16, 2024

Portrait of Ken Ribet wearing a green shirt with a dark backgroundMathematician Ken Ribet is well known for a 1990 paper that paved the way, five years later, for a historic proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, one of the most famous unsolved mathematical problems of modern times.

But an oft-cited paper he wrote earlier in his career, in 1976, is dearer to his heart and has now earned him a coveted...

Forecasting Volcanic Flows: Professor Penny Wieser

December 6, 2024

Person wearing shorts and a blue zip up jacket over a purple puffy vest, standing outdoors with a mountain peak behind them

Since mountains move at a geological pace, are geologists ever in much of a rush? Maybe that depends on the scientist. Out of the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption, modern volcanology was born. Governments provided funding to develop forecasts for eruptions. Igneous petrology, the specialization focused on rock...

Searching Where the Light is Shining: Professor Gabriel Orebi Gann

September 3, 2024

Particle physics research is spinning its wheels, trying to gain traction on a very basic problem. Thirteen billion years ago, the Big Bang produced equal amounts of matter and antimatter. Theory holds that every particle has an antimatter companion that is virtually identical to itself, but with the opposite charge. But there are a lot more ‘ordinary’ particles than antiparticles – you reading this right now is clear evidence – so where is all the missing antimatter?

Theoretical physicists float a bunch of possible explanations for this...

Exploring Mysticism, Aesthetics, and Experience: An Interview with Professor Niklaus Largier

November 8, 2024

Niklaus Largier is Chair in the department of Comparative Literature, is a professor in the departments of German and Comparative Literature, and is affiliated with the Programs in Medieval Studies, Religious Studies, and the Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory.

His scholarship covers an extensive range of interests, including the intersections of literature, philosophy, theology, and other fields of knowledge within medieval and early modern German literature. Professor Largier’s work delves into topics such as ascetic practices, eroticism, and the literary imagination, as well...

Remains and Resistance: Native Voices’ ‘Antíkoni’

November 7, 2024

The burial rites at the heart of Sophocles’s famous tragedy Antigone can seem arcane to many contemporary Western audiences. But a new adaptation at Los Angeles’s Native Voices, Beth Piatote’s Antíkoni, reimagines the play as a complicated, humanizing tragedy about a Nez Perce family living in our nation’s capital, and caught between the pressures of the outside world and a nationalist party that threatens to silence their history. Merging Nez Perce storytelling with the struggle over ancestors...

UC Berkeley professor breaks down the science of ‘Inside Out 2’

November 6, 2024

There’s a scene in Pixar’s hit film Inside Out 2 when teen Riley, the human protagonist of the Inside Out world, senses that one of her 13-year-old friends isn’t telling her everything. The audience zooms in to Riley’s mind, where her emotions are trying to figure it all out. Disgust is on top of it. She pulls up a screen and starts examining Riley’s friend’s furrowed brow. “Enhance,” Disgust barks, as the view pushes into the telltale corrugator muscle that controls our eyebrows.

That scene,...

Election 2024: Berkeley scholars explore the complex dynamics of a historic campaign

October 31, 2024

While few would have expected this year’s presidential campaign to be tame, the run-up to Nov. 5 has brought historic levels of tumult, from May’s felony conviction of Donald Trump to the July announcement that Kamala Harris would replace Joe Biden as the Democratic nominee —...